


under the shape of years

by karples



Category: DCU (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Beginnings, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ensemble Cast, Gen, M/M, One Shot Collection
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-03
Updated: 2016-11-05
Packaged: 2019-01-28 21:49:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12616300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karples/pseuds/karples
Summary: Or: alternate beginnings to the New 52 and Rebirth.





	1. or: if the new 52 didn't reboot the timeline

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> first up: a grayson remix! i had fun with the series, but i also... really wanted the titans in there.

Dick woke to a metronomic beeping and cold tubes attached like leeches to his body and believed, for a single, devastating moment, that he was still hooked up to a bomb. He wondered why it was so dark, until he peeled open his eyes. _Whatever happened to those detective skills?_ he thought, staring at the stalactites of the Batcave, and then at Donna.

Well. Donna was a surprise.

Ozone-singed, Donna smiled down at him, and Dick, helpless, smiled back.

“Looking good, Boy Wonder,” she said, eyes crinkling at the corners. Dick hadn’t seen her in forever--she’d been scouring outer space, he heard, hunting for the Lantern who’d been lost in the Vega galaxy, and anyway, some of the lines in her face were new. They were all getting older, weren’t they?

“Thanks. Lookin’ good yourself,” Dick croaked. He sounded awful, like a clogged drainpipe. As he became more lucid he realized that his fists hurt more than the rest of him--an aquifer of blood throbbing beneath his skin, searching for an exit. “Am I... concussed?”

Donna smoothed his hair back from his forehead. Wow, Dick loved her, _loved_ her, missed her. She tapped a small remote on the bedstand--some kind of pager. “And hopped up on medication, but even that’s not enough, hmm?”

“So I’m concussed... and high.”

“Understatement of the century,” said Garth, materializing a few feet away. Roy shouldered him aside and approached the bed, his grin bright in the artificial glow of the nearby Batcomputer.

Dick squinted in mock suspicion. “Where have you all... been hiding?”

“Caves. Around. Y’know, if someone got lost in here and starved to death, I’d believe it,” Roy said, nodding at Donna. “How’re my Double D’s?”

Dick and Donna groaned. “One more intact than the other,” Donna said.

Dick surmised that Donna had just arrived. _Detective skills returning!_ He struggled to recall what happened between the Murder Machine--awful name, zero out of ten--and the Batcave, but only succeeded in amplifying his migraine.

Wally lapped the cave and zoomed to a hair-raising stop. Bile rose in Dick’s mouth, and he closed his eyes to curb his nausea. “HeyaIgotthesummons--”

When Dick tuned back into the conversation, Donna was saying, “...awake, but not entirely here.” Roy’s grin hadn’t fled his face, but the laughter in it had faded out, leaving it more sober, more discerning. Dick had pinched himself earlier, added a vicious twist to make the pain stay, to make it ground him. He thought that nobody had noticed. Evidently, it hadn’t escaped Roy.

“Give me some credit. I’m... _mostly_ here,” Dick said, focusing hard. Being awake was like pushing past a curtain, one of those velvety drapes in Wayne Manor--heavy and redolent of a history so dense, so extensive, that it was at times burdensome. Of extinguished voices, of Bruce.

 _Bruce._ Dick’s mind cleared. He slipped back into himself like water learning the shape of its container--Lex Luthor’s hand over his mouth and nose, the pill on his tongue. The shouting match in the Batcave, his argument with Bruce that might’ve resolved itself if Dick’s heart hadn’t flubbed up.

Apparently the cardiovascular system didn’t appreciate being forcibly stopped and restarted. So Dick had keeled over mid-spat... must’ve bumped his head and given Bruce a scare... and it was back to bedrest, but not before Dick sent out a summons to the year one Teen Titans plus Roy...

...thereby ruining Bruce’s plans of having him play possum and take down an international spy organization or two. At least Bruce wasn’t _too_ upset. The presence of the Teen-Titans-plus-Roy told Dick as much.

“ _Buddy,_ ” Wally said, pulling back his cowl. “You know, you were touch ‘n go for a while.  _Not_ fun.” His face was concerned, streaked with sweat and grease, and he stank the way speedsters got after a very, very long anxiety run. Flash funk, they used to joke.

Dick grimaced. “Sorry. Wasn’t on purpose.”

“Better not have been,” Wally shot back.

“Team bleeding hearts,” Roy said. “Literally, in my case.”

“I’m assuming you didn’t call us here for a reunion?” Garth raised an eyebrow, tired but fond. There was something congealed on his collar; baby spit-up, Dick realized. Dick and Donna were the only ones here without living children.

Living. It was terrible to need that qualifier.

“Bingo,” Dick said, curling his fingers around Donna’s. “ _You_... get a prize. You get to pick what I say first.”

Garth laughed very softly. “And what are my choices?”

“Short topic. Long topic.”

Garth sighed. “The former first, please.”

“I’m retiring Nightwing,” Dick said, straightforward. Shocked, Wally’s outline blurred like a thumbprint on glass. Roy opened his mouth, something indecipherable and complicated in his face--Dick held up a hand. It kept shaking, damn it. “That’s the first topic, which leads into the second. I’ve, uh... I’ve got a new assignment.”

The cave erupted in objections. Garth appeared simultaneously worried and exasperated; Roy looked like he’d been bricked. Wally’s face was red, and he was snapping something along the lines of, “--Bet Batman put you up to--If Batman jumped off a bridge, would _you_ jump off a bridge--”

“Hear me out?” Dick said, trying for his leader voice. It emerged shriveled and shrunken.

“At death’s door and still busy,” Donna murmured, tucking in the edge of Dick’s blanket. “Whatever will we do with you?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Knowing you,” said Roy, lingering as the team departed, “I’d swear that you planned to go into cardiac arrest, just to soften up the Bat.”
> 
> “Even I don’t think that far ahead,” said Dick. He searched Roy’s expression as discreetly as he could, and Roy looked right back at him, mouth tucked into a half-smile.


	2. or: a spin-off on titans rebirth

The squat coffee table in front of the tv has its own skyline: empty cartons stacked one over another and microwave dinner bowls rising like uneven towers, backlit by images of giant yammering mouths, angry waving arms. Roy sinks into his saggy beanbag chair and doesn't press unmute. Soap operas make for good lipreading practice--everyone's so emotional, so overwrought, that Roy's struggling to piece together a sentence. He's thinking about leveling the pisa of pizza boxes for a better view when there's a distinct tha-thunk. Roy pauses, ears ringing with static and silence. Then the sound repeats itself, more impatiently, and the figure crouched like a gargoyle waves from the window.

“What show is that?” says Nightwing.

“You're bleeding!” says Roy.

“Oh, yeah,” says Nightwing, as Roy ducks into the kitchen for his first aid kit. “Sorry, I think I dripped on your rug.”

“No, no, you’re good. It'll wash out.” Roy reemerges with antiseptic and a lighter and a needle and essentially everything in his emergency cabinet. Then he scans the seamless fit of the Nightwing suit, like kevlar melted over skin, and the gash in Nightwing’s side. “Not a zippers kinda guy, huh? What is it--velcro, double-stick tape?”

Nightwing grins. “No, there's a zipper of sorts. Opens from behind.” He parks his bum on the coffee table and types a code into his gauntlet, wincing when he tries to reach back. Roy swats his hands away, or ‘bats’ them away--lucky that Roy's mind-mouth filter is presently functional.

“Let me,” Roy says. The clasp is at the nape of Nightwing’s neck, where his sweat-damp hair curls over the first knob of his spine, and the drag of the suit as it peels open is heavy and familiar--the scarred brown skin, the fine shoulder blades. Roy's heart is in his mouth, his heart is beating on his tongue, pounding like a bad bruise, a dislodged blood clot over an exit wound. The past few months have been like this--whiplash triggered by small things, otherwise inconsequential.

“We've done this before,” Roy says thickly.

The memories that Wally returned to them aren't enough. Roy already knows what it’s like to lose an eternity of time, to suffer through an endless day, to have an uneventful month of endless days slip away, to surrender a year to blank space. What he feels now isn't much different, gauzy and empty and yearning.

Nightwing prods at his wound. His name is Dick, Roy thinks, first Robin, the Dark Heir, Prince of Gotham, more legend than human, dead and then alive.

“I have a theory,” Dick says in a voice equally clouded with emotion. “Or, well, Batman has a theory.”

Roy wets a cotton swab with alcohol to disguise the tremor in his hands--anticipation, apprehension. Itching for action. “Cool,” he says. “Then let’s hear it.”


End file.
